


the art of remembrance

by Sixthlight



Series: the past is always present [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Art, Ethics, Family, Gen, Mentions of Violence, War Crimes, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26492881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Nile threw up her hands. “You guys are all ‘love of my life’ this and ‘best beloved’ that, and now what, you want me to be extra-clear on how much of a giant war criminal your husband was?”
Relationships: Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Series: the past is always present [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926112
Comments: 41
Kudos: 733





	the art of remembrance

**Author's Note:**

> This story is (mildly) critical of Nile as a member of the US military & mentions documented US war crimes.

They were staying here two weeks, so the day after Nicky had made lasagne and maybe told her that he might have _eaten people_ back in his Sith days (wild horses could not have made Nile ask for clarification on that), Nile went out and used her high school Spanish to buy a sketchpad and some pencils.

She spent the first half an hour doodling aimlessly to get her wrist used to the movement, the way her high school art teacher had always told them to do and they never had. She’d sat down intending to do a still life with a bowl of tangerines Nicky had put on the table, just anything to get her back in the zone, but found herself instead sketching the rough lines of bodies and hands. The outline of her mother’s glasses emerged as if her pencil was unearthing it from the page.

“Is that your family?” Joe asked from behind her; Nile shrieked and lost ten years of her life, which was a much less meaningful metaphor than it had been.

“Sorry!” He backed away, throwing up his hands and grimacing ruefully. “Sorry. Didn’t meant to interrupt.”

“It’s all right,” Nile said. “If I didn’t mind anybody seeing I wouldn’t be sitting with my back to the door. I thought I was gonna draw the fruit bowl. My hands had other ideas.”

“Yes, I know that feeling.”

“Do you ever draw them? Your family?”

Joe just looked at her a moment, a worried softness in the creases around his eyes, and Nile looked away abruptly. “Never mind. Not my business.”

“Hold on,” he said, and left the room. He re-entered a minute later with his latest sketchbook; they were always the same general size and shape, but Nile recognised this as the one he’d bought in Cairo last month.

“I don’t always,” he said, pulling up the chair next to her at the dining table. “But I was thinking about you and your family, I suppose. It’s something I do every so often. Just to make sure I still can.”

He opened it on a page about a quarter of the way through. There was a study of a pair of hands – Nicky’s, Nile was certain – and the half-finished arch of a small medieval window, and a much more detailed scene of a courtyard, with a fountain, and people sitting around it. The faces weren’t rendered in detail, like Nile knew he was capable of, but the lines were so carefully chosen that they communicated much more than was held on the page.

“That’s Aisha,” he said, tapping one, a woman holding a toddler. “My wife.”

“Your _wife_?” Nile said. “I mean – I’m sorry. I just wasn’t expecting…”

Joe laughed. “Hey, that’s fair. But I was thirty-three when I died the first time. It took a lot to not get married, in those days. Nicky probably only managed it because of the Church, and even then, Latin priests were still married sometimes. We were happy, while it lasted.”

“Did you ever see her again, afterwards?”

He shook his head. “No. I died, and then…a lot of things happened. By the time I could have gone, I knew it wouldn’t be kind.”

“I thought about that. What it would do to my mom, if I walked back in the door.” Nile closed Joe’s sketchbook gently. “Do you miss her? All of them?”

“That’s…complicated, see.” Joe leaned back in his chair, on two legs. “Time smooths over the details. I loved her, and I remember loving her, but I don’t wish myself back there, or then. Sometimes I go years between thinking of any of them. Depends if you think of that as _missing_.”

“That’s what I don’t want.” Nile laid a hand on her own sketchpad. “The first month, I woke up every day missing them. And the next. And then today I realised, until I started drawing, I hadn’t thought about them at all.”

“You can’t live in grief forever. Your mind won’t let you,” Joe said, simply, and waited until Nile had finished clearing her throat.

“Seems like there’s a lot about you and Nicky I don’t know yet,” she said, when she was done. “You had a wife, and you told me just now he used to be a _priest_ , and…”

“And I heard you were asking him about the Crusades, yesterday.”

“It’s a lot,” Nile said, diplomatically. She was so diplomatic you could have put up a flag and a four-metre fence around her and called her a US embassy. “Am I going to find out that much…stuff…about all of you?”

“Well, I make no promises about Andy,” Joe said, returning his chair to a less perilous position. “She was alive for five thousand years before she and Quỳnh found us. But no, I know what you’re asking. Nicky’s past is very particularly his own.”

“And you forgave him.”

“No,” Joe said, his eyes twinkling in a way that was completely incongruous to the conversation, then sobering. “I killed him, remember? Quite a few times.”

“You must have noticed it wasn’t working.”

“Oh, I noticed. But you watch people get dragged screaming out of their houses and their places of worship to have their throats cut, and one of the assholes doing it won’t even stay decently dead when you kill him? You’d do it a few extra times, too. Even if it wasn’t working.”

“ _Shit_ , okay!” Nile dragged a hand across her face.

“I thought you talked about this?”

“I didn’t ask for an itemised list of what he did!”

“Good choice, you’d still be there.”

Nile threw up her hands. “You guys are all ‘love of my life’ this and ‘best beloved’ that, and now what, you want me to be extra-clear on how much of a giant war criminal your husband was?”

“No,” Joe said, leaning forward on his elbows. “I want you to understand that we live a life where we kill people, when we think that’s the right thing to do, and that my Nicolò is a good and kind man who you can trust with your life or more importantly many other people’s, and that he still ended up in that place, at that time, doing things that have gone down in infamy. The lesson from that isn’t about him, not really. It’s about what we have to keep choosing not to be.” 

“I’m not a fanatic from the eleventh century or whatever,” Nile snapped. “I was a soldier in the US military, and -”

“I know,” Joe said, very plainly, and it was like being punched in the chest.

“That’s not fair,” Nile said, and hated herself for saying it.

“They called it a crusade,” Joe said. “When they went into Afghanistan.”

“It wasn’t like that. And I was _seven_.”

“Very few things are quite like what they call the First Crusade,” Joe allowed. “But there’s a line through history, all the same. It takes a certain kind of mindset to march into someone else’s land.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. Just, what I said to you the first night, about it depending on the century? That goes for all of us, sooner or later. We fight for what we think is right, and sometimes we’re wrong. If you’re going to ask about our past sins…it bears thinking about.”

Nile swallowed around a lump in her throat. She might have expected this kind of thing from Andy; from Joe, funny, generous, kind Joe, it was like walking into a rake in the grass she hadn’t seen.

“I know about all the things you’re talking about,” she said. “My Lai, and Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. That’s not – I _know_ how those – you can’t fix any of that by standing aside.” She swallowed again. “My dad died in Afghanistan. I gotta believe he was trying to do the right thing.”

“I know,” Joe said again, and patted her hand. She wanted to throw his hand off for a second, and then met his eyes; there wasn’t any judgement there.

“Nicky did say you were the forgiving one,” she said, after the silence had eased.

“My best beloved thinks too highly of me.” Joe quirked a smile. “I’m not sure I am. Just – I’ve lived too long to carry hating people with me, much. God has given us all this time; why waste it on that?”

“When you can just tackle the assholes out of skyscrapers?”

“Well….” said Joe, and winked at her. She laughed, defeated.

“Do you want me to let you get back to this?” He tapped her sketchpad.

“I want a cup of coffee,” she said, “and then I want you to tell me what it was like when they finally invented perspective, in the Renaissance. I remembered this morning that you were around for that.”

“The _Renaissance_ ,” Joe said with great disdain, “forget that, I’m gonna tell you about the first time Andy and Quỳnh took us to China. But first, I will accept that I owe you coffee, for the interruption.”

“Damn straight you do,” said Nile, and closed her sketchpad, to wait for when she wanted to remember.


End file.
